Apple Pie and Enchiladas: The Interlude
by gaelicchick
Summary: There's a saying that 'You can't go home again.' Lucy Montero has spent the first part of her summer in St. Mungo's, and now that she's about to be let loose, where is she to go? Companion Piece to Apple Pies and Enchiladas. **Finished**
1. Part One: One Flew East, One Flew West, ...

Apple Pie and Enchiladas: The Interlude  
  
Part One: One Flew East, One Flew West, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest  
  
Lucy Montero sighed, placed her hands on her knees, and raised herself out of her chair, where she had been sitting next to Ann Longbottom for the past hour. Ann stared into the distance with a blank curiosity, one hand absentmindedly stroking the kitten curled up on the blanket across her lap. The remains of a daisy she had been plucking lay forgotten in her other hand as she intently watched birds circling overhead.  
  
"Ann, I think its time we go inside, would you like to go inside?"  
  
Ann didn't respond. Lucy bit her lip, took a breath, and placed a hand on Ann's shoulder, turning the woman so she had to look at the young girl. Almost immediately after the contact Ann began shrink away, and Lucy could feel the beginnings of the wild thrashings that had rewarded her with a lump on the head the last time she attempted this.  
  
But this time she was ready. She immediately used the physical contact to follow the familiar path into Ann's subconscious. She didn't stray from the carefully laid traces of her own energy, Ann's mind was a swirling void of terror, confusion, loneliness and anger, and a stray `step' at best meant an hour or more trying to find her way back to herself, at worst she'd never get out and end up as catonic as half the third floor of St. Mungo's psychiatric ward. Finding her way, she located the site of most intense activity, and focused her energy on sending a soothing presence. She could see a deep ruby red flow of energy penetrate the greenish gray cloud that was causing the tantrum, and dissipate it from the inside out. Once she was satisfied, she carefully pulled herself back out and looked down at Ann. She was calm, and as lucid as Lucy had ever seen her.  
  
With her hand still on the older woman's shoulder, Lucy repeated, "Inside, Ann?"  
  
Ann nodded clumsily, and Lucy wheeled her back to the Longbottom's room herself, rather than activating the `return' spell on the wheelchair. She found that the more time she spent with the couple in their new quarters, the better they worked with her in treatment.  
  
An orderly was waiting in the hall outside Ann's room to take her down to lunch.  
  
"You look nice today Ann. Why don't we fix you up a little and get some food? Henry's waiting there already."  
  
The sturdy looking woman waited as Ann got to her feet, and held the door open to let her into the room. After Ann had entered she turned back.  
  
"If I try to brush her hair today, is she going to bite?"  
  
Lucy shook her head. "I don't think so, I just got her calmed. Come around from in front of her though, she tends to get more defensive faster when she isn't expecting it."  
  
The woman nodded. "Are you seeing Henry after lunch?"  
  
Lucy shook her head, "Before dinner, I have a meeting with Dr. Fizzit after lunch to discuss getting his dosage changed."  
  
The orderly raised her eyebrows. The Longbottoms may be Lucy's case, but she gave her the look of one who had seen worlds more than she and knew it. "You think that's wise? They give him enough stuff as it is."  
  
"I meant having it reduced."  
  
"You're not serious? Henry Longbottom took three orderlies at least to control him before they upped his dosage."  
  
"And that was years ago. Suppressing his behavior magically for that long can't be good. Besides, if I am ever going to talk to the real Henry it won't be through a fog of complacency spells. There's a reason Ann's been coming along with more visible progress, she never had that degree of medication."  
  
"She never tried to throw her doctor out the window either."  
  
Lucy sighed. "It was only four months after the attack and they were trying to take blood samples, I do read these files you know. Any animal that feels caged and trapped is going to lash out violently, and they were all so noisy and pushy it was no wonder Henry snapped. In his mind the doctors were the ones who had caused him the pain and he was angry. It didn't help that you people had him all tied up either."  
  
"So you're telling me that anyone who was put in that position would behave the same way."  
  
"More or less. It's not Henry's fault he had the strength to do damage, it was a natural reaction."  
  
"Really? And what did you do to the last person who caused you pain? Toss them off a building?"  
  
Lucy grinned and shook her head, "No."  
  
The orderly turned to walk back into the room. "I thought not, bunch of rub-"  
  
"I tried to crack open his skull with a cauldron."  
  
Lucy left the orderly staring at her in a mixture of disbelief and wariness as she headed off down the corridor to grab a bite before her meeting.  
  
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"Better now?"  
  
Henry nodded and Lucy handed him a handkerchief, he clumsily dried his tears and blew his nose before trying to put it into his pillow case. Lucy sighed and removed it. She reached over on the bedside table and handed him a glass of water, which he drained, and again tried to put into the pillowcase. Lucy stopped him this time before he did it, shaking her head and placing it back on the table.  
  
"No."  
  
She helped straighten the sheets and tangled blankets and sat down again cross legged on the bed. She took Henry's wrists in hers, and began to quiet her breathing.  
  
It had been over a week since Henry's medication had been cut, at Lucy's request, to a quarter of its usual amount. As a result she was now responsible for controlling his outbreaks, soothing terrified orderlies, and the most recent development, calming him after nightmares, which he had several of every night. The hospital had moved her from the temporary staff dormitories in the nearby building to a spare room on the ward, which was very eerie by itself.  
  
However, Lucy thought the nightmares were a good development, and well worth her lost sleep. It was a sign that Henry could still connect to his memories and conscious, thinking mind, that the Henry Longbottom that had married Ann and named his son after his father was still active in there, just lost.  
  
It had meant extensive and careful exploration of Henry's mind, following signs of terror and anxiety to locate the source of the nightmares, and begin to chip away at it. Hopefully, once it was worn down thin enough Henry would pull past the fears on his own and start to come around. What Lucy was helping with and what Henry couldn't do by himself was erode a wall of fear and apprehension that had built upon itself for over a decade until it was, metaphorically speaking, a wall 200 feet thick. If the real Henry was behind there, no one would have been able to hear him screaming.  
  
Although that was reassuring, it was still dangerous. For one thing, a mind in that much chaos was easy to get lost in, and could quickly become a prison if Lucy lost touch with what was real and what was Henry's dream.  
  
A more obvious problem was that Henry Longbottom was well over six feet tall and built like a Sherman Tank. He was lean, but even after all the years of captivity he remained incredibly strong and muscular. Despite worries about handling a stronger patient, once the doctors had discovered that working out helped lessen Henry's aggression, it had become a part of his daily routine.  
  
Looking at him Lucy continued to be amazed at how Henry and Ann could ever have produced a son like Neville. Physically the boy looked like his mother, the same bone structure, the same eyes and hair, although there were lines in his face that reminded her of his father. She speculated over whom he acted like more, but she would never find that out until she got through Henry's nightmares.  
  
Which were complex and frustrating. Now, more than ever she was convinced that they had been the cause of Henry's violent behavior during his first months at the hospital. She'd read about it in his records, Neville's grandmother had brought the little boy regularly, but it wasn't till almost a year later when Henry was up to 10 constraining spells a day that they let his son see him, and by then he was so out of it you could have dyed the walls purple and he wouldn't notice. Lucy shook her head, poor Neville.  
  
She wished she had Rosa's book that held her case notes, but she was reasonably confidant that without the spells lessening his mental activity, Henry was becoming trapped in a cycle within his mind. Somehow the energy paths of reality and dreams had crossed, and when something triggered either or them, it set the other one off. So a nightmare could wake Henry and he would not know the difference between Lucy and the tormentor in his mind; likewise, any physical stress, like being strapped down for medical procedures, or even the initial jump that comes from being taken by surprise, could call up the terrors and nightmares in his brain, and since those dream paths crisscrossed with reality, triggering a dream could throw him into the spiral of not knowing the difference between his mind and reality.  
  
Her first task then, was to uncross those paths. Her second was to deal with the source, the festering knot of terror that was the center of Henry's world had to be dissipated.  
  
She didn't have the energy for either now, but once she got him back to sleep and headed for her room, Lucy felt better than she had in weeks. Her job was to try and re-establish the normal energy cycles and flows in Henry and Ann's minds. Now, the paths within the brain were incredibly complex, and she had been going slow because she was inexperienced and didn't know how everything worked. But she did have the healer instinct, she had known something was wrong, now she knew part of what that was, now she could fix it. And hopefully, when she did, the Longbottom's minds would begin to heal themselves.  
  
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"How long has he been in there?"  
  
"Three hours."  
  
Silence.  
  
"That's a record, you know. When he was younger we were lucky if he could stay thirty minutes. I mean, that young, trying to get your parents to recognized you."  
  
"Well, his grandmother has been putting up pictures of him on every available surface in there..."  
  
"Did you-"  
  
"Explain to him? Yes, as well as I could, anyway. I didn't really need to do much. That boy may not be able to tell eel eyes from newt testicles, but if anyone knows anything about patience..."  
  
"It's him. I guess he has to."  
  
"It's his grandmother I'm a little more worried about. She was so happy when Dumbledore told her... and no matter what I said, I just don't think she really fully understands..."  
  
"Neville will make sure she does. He can't remember his socks, but he does take surprisingly good care of her."  
  
"She's all he's got."  
  
"You should have seen his parents, I was a first year when they were in fifth. His father-"  
  
Lucy and the orderly, Jerome, stopped talking as the door to the Longbottoms' room opened and Neville stepped out. As was usual after a visit to his parents, his face was unreadable. He gestured with his head toward the doors at the end of the hall, and Lucy got up and followed him, jogging a bit to keep up, Neville always wanted to get the hell off of the ward as soon as his visit was over.  
  
They walked in silence passed the nurse's station, the enchanted doors recognizing their `visitor' and `employee' cloaking spells and letting them through. The doors weren't permeable to those with `patient' spells in the psych ward. The next corridor led them through the long term disease ward, and the corridor at the end of that led them to the `Hub'. St Mungo's was essentially designed with a circular center, the Hub, with various wings starting there and branching off. The emergency and operating wards were the only wards inside the Hub itself, everything else branched off. It was easy to get lost, so the building itself was enchanted with literally thousands of guiding spells.  
  
One of those controlled the network of moving staircases in the center of the Hub. You could look straight down from the top floor to the bottom, and see nothing but staircases moving to connect to others, which connected with others, which moved to land at one of the hundreds of doorways in the side of the circular walls. Lucy and Neville waited in the door way from the fifth floor northwest wing, and Lucy said clearly to the banister leading to nothing,  
  
"First floor reception."  
  
After a few seconds, a few of the floating staircases began to align. As soon as one connected to the doorway, they began to walk down, onto and further down the next one it connected to, while the first one detached and went elsewhere.  
  
Lucy had hated this her first week here, and had gotten so nervous she had frozen on a staircase in the middle of the air. She waited too long and the other staircase disconnected, so she had been stranded until that staircase was summoned elsewhere, after which she had followed a nurse wherever she was going, just gratefull to be on solid ground. The whole trick, the woman had explained, was just to keep going down, not to think about it, there was always going to be another staircase to climb, and concerning yourself that there was nothing behind you wouldn't help things at all. After that it was just a matter of practice.  
  
They stepped off on the ground floor and headed for the doors. Outside, Neville sat down on a bench and Lucy did the same, not wanting to speak before he did.  
  
"They're different."  
  
"Try to remember that I told you in the beginning that, well, you might not-"  
  
Neville stopped her nervous babbling by holding up his hand.  
  
"It's all right, Lucy, really. I mean, no, they didn't all of a sudden give me the heart to heart talk I dreamt about since I was five, but I was able to kiss my mother's cheek without her becoming terrified, she actually smiled. And my dad... my dad... normally he has so many spells on him he doesn't realize anyone is in the room."  
  
Lucy went to speak again, but Neville stopped her.  
  
"Lucy, I know I'm pretty ridiculous at school, but believe me when I tell you I knew not to expect miracles when Dumbledore told me what you wanted to do. But what I saw in there, it is a miracle Lucy. It was a miracle that anyone wanted to reopen their case in the first place."  
  
Lucy wasn't sure what to say to that, so she stared out at the fountain with a statue of St. Mungo in it.  
  
"I spoke with the supervisor and a few of the orderlies. A few weeks ago we switched the physician in charge of your parents. The new one, Alexander, he's younger, but he has plenty of experience, used to work in the children's ward, he should do really well."  
  
Neville nodded. "When do you go?"  
  
Lucy shrugged, "They haven't told me yet. It should be fairly soon. The Circle has me starting their assignment in July sometime."  
  
Neville nodded, then rose as his grandmother approached. Lucy greeted Harriet Longbottom with a quick hug, then waited outside until they had walked around the building and out of sight. 


	2. Part Two: Mama, I'm Coming Home

Chapter Two: Mama I'm Coming Home  
  
"And you promise to let me know if anything happens, good, bad, I don't care, you'll write me?"  
  
"Yes."  
  
"Did I tell you how to find me, because I'm not sure where I'll be but if you send the reports to that school in Seville I told you about-"  
  
"And someone there will know how to find you. You only told me three times today, four yesterday, and six the day before that. They are going to be fine Lucy."  
  
"I can't help but feel like I'm giving up."  
  
"You're not, you're being kicked out. You did great, but, like you said, now is the time to let Henry and Ann try to put themselves back together."  
  
"But Henry still-"  
  
"Henry will be just fine. He's sleeping through the night, without medication, he'll be fine."  
  
"I-"  
  
"That's it! Now I am sick of looking at your ugly face, get out of here!"  
  
Lucy grinned and gave Jerome a hug before throwing her satchel over her shoulder and turning towards the Floo.  
  
"Oh good great little gods here I go again. Diagon Ally!" With a gulp and prayer she was whisked away from St. Mungos and towards the great unknown.  
  
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Lucy's service to the Ministry for the summer had ended July 2nd . The Circle was giving her the next day in Diagon Ally to buy her school supplies for next year before she reported to Seville to receive her Master's Duties for the next few months. She had written Hermione about it, who had written Ron, who had sent a list of supplies for sixth year students, compiled from his older brothers' old lists, which contained most likely what would be in the letters coming out later in the summer. It was just general supplies, the cauldron and potions materials that never changed from year to year, the same Transfiguration text that had been used for almost a century, as well as anything else that had been the same for the previous four Weasleys. Fortunately, Ancient Runes, Herbology, and Potions never changed textbooks, and there was no textbook for Advanced Astronomy. Hermione's parents had agreed to pick up anything new that appeared on the list, and Lucy would pay Hermione back when she arrived at Hogwarts. There shouldn't be too much, whatever Hagrid was going to assign for Care of Magical Creatures, and Defense Against Dark Arts.  
  
Defense Against Dark Arts the previous year had been uncharacteristically boring, with multitudes of papers but nothing really surprising out of Professor Averil, who always seemed a bit unsure of himself, and who had unexpectedly vanished about a week before the end of term; which didn't help anyone since he had already written the final exam as well as enchanted the key, so the students were forced to take it anyway. However, since there was a new teacher, again, the Weasley's list wouldn't predict the text or materials needed.  
  
She wouldn't be getting her paycheck from the Ministry for some time, so to compensate for what the small pile in Gringotts wouldn't cover, she had been given an overdraw slip with half a dozen signatures on it, including Fudge's, goblins were suspicious after all. It was a standard deferral of payment slip that stated that the Ministry would cover the amount overdrawn for a certain period of time, by the end of that period the bearer, in this case Lucy, would need to have deposited her summer earnings into the account to cover the debt. It was a headache, she was horrible with money, and the goblin at the desk scared her. She didn't breathe easy until she was back on the street.  
  
She made her way through the crowded streets past the nicer stores, and further down, to the bargain district. She managed to find herself a new cauldron, sixth years needed a different size and material for more advanced potions, for half the price she had paid last year, since she was early and was catching old stock the merchants were trying to clear out. She worked her way down the list, once again getting a good deal on slightly flawed rolls of parchment, as well as used books and quills that were slightly battered, but without any damage to the shaft. They might look a little raggedy, but they would write just as well as the fancy ones. The money she saved enabled her to get her potions supplies at retail price, which was good since last year her fungus of footworm had been so impure it turned what should have been a red solution a disturbing shade of purple.  
  
Her prize find had been an antique brass telescope that had been lying in the back of Astrid's Previously-Owned-But-Virtually-Undamaged Wares For Wizards. She had been shuffling through stacks of old books when she found the box. 'Broken' had been scrawled on it in clumsy handwriting. The price was barely more than what she had paid for quills, so she bought it, deciding it might be a good summer project.  
  
Her trunk had already been sent ahead to Seville, so before leaving the ally she headed into the basement of the Leaky Cauldron, which was actually a separate business, Miracle Murray's Marvelous Magical Storage: For Wizards With Phenomenal Cosmic Power and Itty Bitty Living Space. The name alone took up the entire wall behind the desk at the bottom of the stairs.  
  
"Hogwarts?" A woman, obviously not Miracle Murray, popped up from behind the counter at the sound of feet coming down the stairs. She was covered, head to toe in Spello-Tape.  
  
"Don't mind me. The industrial strength variety, it takes a bit of working over. Yes, just place them all on the counter, that's a good girl."  
  
Lucy smiled and waited patiently as her bags were measured and weighed, before being placed in a small crate, the size of a shoe box. Jerome had said he once saw an entire set of cauldrons, 5 different grades, and three brooms go into one of those boxes. It seemed to have no bottom, and no matter how wide an object was, they all seemed to slide in without a problem. Lucy wondered where her things were really being stored, but she wanted to fit in, and smiled as if she did this all the time.  
  
"There you are dear, if you'll just sign in the wax, privacy insurance, you know."  
  
The witch had dribbled melted wax over the edge, sealing the lid on the box with a tap of her wand, which left a seal in the still warm wax that had the store insignia as well as the date and time of the transaction. Lucy signed her name in the wax with a stylus, only to see it turn bright gold and solidify against the red seal.  
  
"There, now, you'll be picking it up first of September, I daresay, or the day before?"  
  
"September first, you will be open early, right?"  
  
"Oh, bless my soul, of course we will be. You are a little early, aren't you though? I don't usually get Hogwarts folk for a few weeks."  
  
Lucy decided she really didn't want to stay all day prattling, and as she handed the woman her money she just shrugged, "I just like to get things out of the way."  
  
"Well you have a nice day dearie."  
  
Lucy felt refreshed to walk out into regular London again, well, as refreshed as she could be, as she was still in England. She had left herself enough money to get a bus to the airport, and when her plane took off that night she was asleep in her seat as soon as the wheels left the ground.  
  
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It was sunny in Seville the next morning as Lucy made her way through the winding streets and tight cavern like allyways of the city's old Jewish Quarter. Finally she found it, a door in the side of a long white wall that seemed to go forever down the block. It had balconies over head, and since the ally was so narrow that one window was about five feet from the one across the ally, tiny walkways with thin metal rails interrupted the light filtering down from above, enabling people to move from building to building without going down to the street.  
  
Lucy stopped at the small wooden door, above which was inscribed one word, "verdad." She looked up to see a bell hanging above the doorway, about eleven feet above the street, with no bell cord. She gave it a small mental nudge that sent it ringing. Lucy laughed aloud when she realized that the bell had been enchanted, not to ring out loud, but inside her head. She could hear it, but from the way it sounded knew that an ordinary person would not notice people who came in and out ringing the bell, which, doubtless, was the point.  
  
A moment later the door opened and an arm reached out, grabbing her and hauling her inside. She couldn't see her attacker before she was picked up in a hug and dropped just as quickly.  
  
"It's nice to see you too, Thomas."  
  
The dark haired, blue eyed boy from the Louisiana bayou just grinned and made a mock bow, sweeping his arms towards the courtyard she had emerged into. "Welcome, to my humble home. Now come on, I'm going to give you the super accelerated tour before they decided to summon you and send you off to Siberia or some equally unpleasant place for the rest of the summer. And is it really true that you're going BACK to that-"  
  
"Yes, and can we leave it at that. I don't think I can explain anymore. How did you find out?"  
  
"Oh, Sophia sent us a missive with the summer assignments and where people who had been, um, displaced, last year were living. Your name wasn't on it, so I assumed you must be going back to England."  
  
"Well I am, not until September, though. And I really hope I am going somewhere warm and dry, I mean, I can adjust to some things, but that is just too big a climate change."  
  
"Any guesses where they'll put you?"  
  
"I wanted to work on taking down the gates, but that got me a big laugh and a 'no', from anyone I wrote about it. Not qualified, not enough experience, first years don't get to do anything exciting, and here I thought being in intermediate was stifling."  
  
Thomas chuckled, "Don't take that too hard, they are barely taking any masters who aren't at least into their fifth year on this, and I think the earliest they are letting people be on site to help feed the workers energy is third year master. And trust me, this wasn't a fun job."  
  
"You got to?"  
  
"Got to? No. Was forced to? Yes. Graduate students here are mostly on their third or fourth thesis, so we made the cut for energy feeders, not for the work itself. That was mostly Adepts anyway. And it's a pain, Lucy, a royal pain. Give me sentry duty at that mirror over energy feeder any day."  
  
Lucy rolled her eyes and let the subject drop. "Well, come on, show me the rest of this place before they feed me to the lions."  
  
The Academy at Seville was a metropolitan school, surviving and thriving amid the bustle of thousands upon thousands of people who were never the wiser. The school itself was built in the traditional architecture of many old homes in the city, with lots of interior courtyards with fountains and foliage surrounded by the interior walls of the building itself. The students, mostly graduates, lived in the student residential wing, which had balconies from the male and female sides, which ran parallel to each other, looking out into a long, narrow courtyard with a reflecting pool. As they walked from one end of the courtyard to the other and entered the school itself, dozens of young students could be seen yelling and carrying on conversations from their own balconies to those on others across the narrow but long courtyard, and some enterprising individuals had set up a walkway for the daring to cross from one side to another at the midpoint. It felt like a home.  
  
Most of the more popular classes were held in the larger inner courtyards, or in one of the larger workrooms. The place had hundreds upon hundreds of workrooms, ranging in size from just big enough for one person to sit crossed legged on the floor, to huge rooms with benches on the floor and all the way up the walls, typical of a Western school, where hundreds of students could levitate themselves up to reach seats near the ceiling. The library, which they didn't have time to visit, was built in the same manner. The school accomplished the large size in tight quarters by simply purchasing the buildings around it. Over the years they had accumulated most of the property on this out of the way street, the main building having been a remnant of an old palace. No one bothered them because, to the 'official' world, at least, they were a seminary of an obscure branch of some religion from the far east, and contact with the outside world was not encouraged.  
  
It wasn't quite as good a cover as the spell that protected Hogwarts, but then, one of the fundamental differences between the Eastern magical world that Hogwarts existed in and the Western world of Seville and Espiritu, was that the Western Circle had neither the population nor the centralized bureaucracy to afford a complete withdrawal from the non-magical world. Stores selling Western magic supplies as well as communities and schools existed among 'muggles', they had no choice, they had been adapting to hiding in the open for thousands of years. Members of the community and their families did not grow up in ignorance of the way the rest of the world worked, most schools that were in cities had telephones, and a few televisions, although wiring a school for electricity was difficult since it would mean letting outsiders in, and that could raise questions. Seville had gotten around it by the sheer luck that a family member of a student, non-gifted, had installed the phone lines when the city first got them, many years ago, and alumni had been doing the repairs ever since. Espiritu, which was in the middle of the desert, had no phone but had never suffered for the lack of it, neither had the Congo schools.  
  
She wished she could have spent the entire summer there, as Thomas introduced her to his friends and showed her as many of the secrets of the school as possible. She was surprised to find out how much the Seville students, most all of them older than herself, were curious about Hogwarts and eastern magic. That was another reason for going back to Hogwarts, as she had been telling herself all summer she was doing the right thing, people needed to know about the Hogwarts world, even if nothing those people did made any sense. This separation and isolation couldn't be a good thing for them in the long run.  
  
Eventually, someone started to talk in Thomas' head, she could tell because his ears perked up for no reason. She waited patiently as he spoke and he finally turned to her, his face not quite as jovial.  
  
"Well, they say they are ready for you."  
  
She grimaced and followed as he led her back to one of the main academic courtyards, up a set of stairs that took her to a second floor patio, and through the doors to the antechamber of the resident Guild officer.  
  
A moment later the doors opened and a boy Thomas's age left, gesturing for Lucy to go in.  
  
She took a deep breath and entered the Guild office. It was a brightly lit room, not too large, but what Lucy had not realized was that the Guild Officer assigned to Seville took audiences in his personal workroom, it wasn't an office at all. She could see books, neatly arranged on stands, cabinets with vials and jars neatly lined up and labeled, and the all important circle painted in white in the center of the floor.  
  
The Guild Officer was seated at a desk that faced the window, enabling him to look down into a tiny courtyard, so small you had a better view into the windows of the neighbors rooms than down the narrow shaft. He didn't look up as she came in, and continued to scribble something down, but he knew she was there.  
  
"Close the door, please, Miss Montero, and do take a seat over here." He gestured to one of two chairs near the desk. Lucy did so.  
  
When he finally turned to meet her Lucy's brown eyes met the gray ones of a man in his mid forties, with a smiling face.  
  
"Sorry to keep you waiting, Evan, you saw him when you came in, just got back from his June post in Egypt and was giving me his report. It took a little while, I have friends in Cairo, you see, and Evan knows them quite well… Well look at me prattle, now let me see, Montero… Montero…." As he spoke he rifled through a stack of papers on his desk, before finally striking on the right one. He lowered his glasses to read it better.  
  
"Let's see, yes, Lucy Montero, Espiritu Institute, oh, my sympathies dearling…"  
  
"It's all right, really…" Lucy didn't want to get into a long conversation about home right now.  
  
"Yes, yes, very good, quite right, now where was I… you'll be sixteen …..first year Master….. la dee da……, previous location: Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Britain, really now? You'll have to tell me about that… ahh, here we are, summer assignment. 'It is the will of this Circle that the above indicated first year Mastery student, in fulfillment with the duties and obligations incumbent upon that position as delivered by the Guild, immediately commence upon a period of no less than six weeks service to Circle and Guild in the form of: general maintenance and repairs, both physical and magical, to the site of the Espiritu Institute in New Mexico, the United States of America.'"  
  
Lucy sat, staring at the smiling man for a full minute before it hit her.  
  
"They're sending me home? I mean, all I have to do this summer, is go home?"  
  
The officer smiled paternally, "Well, you will be responsible for making repairs, the maintainers couldn't touch nearly all the damage that was done you see. And since you are practically the only person left with a tie to that place, it seemed a good bet that you would recognize what energies had been distorted easier than someone who had never been there before."  
  
Lucy paused and thought about that for a moment. "They, they aren't just doing this because they feel sorry for me, are they? I mean, I don't want anyone's pity and if I can be of more service somewhere else then go ahead and put me there."  
  
The man shook his head. "Sophia thought you might not trust us. I assure you, at the moment there really isn't another place to assign you. You shouldn't take this personally, but first year masters aren't of much use in more complex spells, you need a little experience first… and this way we won't have to spare valuable Circle members who could be of better use elsewhere."  
  
Lucy nodded, "I just, I just didn't want to find out later that taking the summer off would slow down my progress toward Adept."  
  
"It won't. And trust me, it won't be a summer off. The energy lines around Espiritu are in a terrible state. Nothing we can't handle, its just time consuming. And frankly, outsiders have been feeling a bit of hostile energy toward them whenever they try to work there. I don't know if you know anything about that…"  
  
Lucy shrugged. The officer nodded. "Fair enough. Well, I believe Lorena Rios was at Espiritu a few months ago working with the repair team, she's here now doing her thesis on energy potential in children, and if you don't mind she's a bit more experienced than you, and she'll make you a gate home if you like. That way it will be easier to take your trunk with you."  
  
Lucy nodded, a little dumbfounded, and rose as the man walked her to the door. "I'll have Lorena meet you in the Mirror Courtyard in about an hour."  
  
With that he left her standing on the balcony, looking down into the courtyard, and shut his doors.  
  
She shook her head. She couldn't believe it. It had been almost nine months, and it felt like an eternity.  
  
"I'm going home."  
  
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&  
  
She shook of the disorientation of the gate faster than she had in the past, partially because she was getting use to it, and partially because she was so anxious to take it all in. She knew where she was as she looked around and got her bearings. She was about a quarter of a mile from the edge of the Espiritu complex. Gating into Espiritu had been blocked out by the clumsy protections the Circle's Maintainers had placed before they left, to keep others from desecrating the site. She couldn't see the school, yet, and knew in order to reach it she would have to get to the other side of the mesa that rose to a towering height a couple hundred meters away.  
  
She raised her trunk off the ground and let it glide along next to her as she made her way skillfully across the rocky landscape. Instinctively she found herself hovering a scant centimeter above the ground, close enough that she could still walk normally, but far enough off to make the terrain easy on her feet.  
  
It was about an hour later that she found herself, sweaty, panting, and happier than she had felt in days, staring at the complex of the Espiritu Institute.  
  
The school was designed like any of the other Pueblo villages, like Sky City, where the Acoma lived, the largest village of its kind in the state, which was situated high atop a mesa. Espiritu was not on top of a mesa, although classes had been held there regularly, but was designed in the same manner, which a few modifications. The buildings were closer together, with no streets running through them. They all touched in some manner, with several courtyards where different sets of rooms and apartments faced each other. Also, unlike the traditional adobe, the buildings had been made out of a different type of stone, something the Adepts had developed long ago, and it was that stone that had prevented the school from being razed to the ground in the attack last winter.  
  
For Lucy, she was certain this was what heaven looked like.  
  
She broke into a run, not caring that she was no longer hovering and that the ground was hot or that if she stopped her trunk was likely to fly into her. She paid no heed and ran on, ran straight to the wall of one of the outer buldings, with a large archway, threw her mental knock at it, and didn't slow down as the gates swung open and she suddenly found herself inside the receiving courtyard and back in the place she had called home from the time she was less than a year old.  
  
That was when she paused, silent, and sat down where she was. It was quiet, very quiet. Well, it ought to be quiet, there was no one here. There hadn't been anyone here for months, thanks to some Dark Lord that the mages and students of the Western Circle had never had anything to do with.  
  
Now that she had caught her breath, she could see the difference. She could see into the windows of the first floor apartments and workrooms, where furniture was lying all over and drawers had been thrown to the floor. And without even using the Sight she could Sense that that flow of energy, the rhythm of her home, was seriously off its beat. The Guild Officer had been right. This was going to take a lot of work.  
  
Well, she thought to herself as she picked herself up and dusted herself off, at least this is something I know how to do. She made her way across the courtyard, and through a doorway that led down a dark cool passage, towards daylight at the other end, and emerged in another courtyard. The had most of the elder Adepts lived in buildings off this courtyard, many had workrooms and libraries in the building that she had just walked through using the corridor. Her mentor, when she had finally grown big enough not to need him at night, had taken a new set of rooms in this part of the school, where it was quieter.  
  
She took the corridor on the right side of the Courtyard of the Anciano's, as the younger students called it, and traveled a short distance into a courtyard that was not really a courtyard. It was very small, and square, and the walls of the building around it stretched up for only two floors. There was also a staircase that made it's way up the side of the walls, and after climbing it Lucy emerged on the roof of the building, with rooftops on the same level stretching out in all directions.  
  
On her right, for example, was the front door of Alexander's apartment, next to which was a ladder to climb up to Henrietta's rooms, which were on top of Alexander's. This was a veritable maze of ladders and doorways, apartments on top of apartments, most of them very small, but cool and comfortable just the same. As you went further across the roofs, the rooms became small, no longer suites of rooms, just rooms. This was the student residence area, referred to as the Maze, for obvious reasons. Almost everyone under 40 lived in this area of the school, and it was the noise that they created that had driven the edlers to seek living arrangements that were as severely separated as possible from their young students.  
  
The couryard below and the rooms on ground level were classrooms and student workrooms, as well as the kitchens and the garden and such. At the very far end was the corridor that led to the far courtyard, which had a cool fountain, as well as the old mission building.  
  
Lucy set out to her left, following the winding paths of the rooftops. Some of the ladders had been knocked about or broken, as she had noticed, and she had to spend a lot of time on the second floor, which sort of like a motel, had a covered walkway outside the doors of the rooms running the length of the building. She finally made her way back to the rooftops, past two doors, up another ladder to the highest level of apartments, occupied mostly by the young and energetic, and crossed the wooden board that connected this roof to the roof next to it. She was now standing in front of the door to her room.  
  
She opened it, to stare at a narrow hall, with a door in the middle on the left, and one on the right. No one lived in the room on the right and Lucy walked past the tapestry made by Dona Mercedes, and gently pushed open the door to her room.  
  
The furniture was turned over, and her mattress and quilts had been pulled off the sleeping shelf in the wall. The old trunk had been thrown open and her old clothes were everywhere. The photo album lay facedown where it had been thrown to oneside. The one of the shutters had been ripped off and the other hung crazily on one hinge, and the floor was covered in dust and dirt from what had blown in over the past few months.  
  
She sighed, took a deep breath, and set her trunk down next to the door. The first thing to do was to get this mess sorted out, she had to live somewhere. She cleaned off the sleeping shelf, which was basically a flat stone slab jutting out from the wall. Lucy was so short that Alexander had built her a beautifully painted set of steps to get up onto her bed when she had first moved into the student wing. Lucy found them dusty, but unbroken in the corner by the wardrobe. She hauled the mattress onto the shelf, and gathered up the guilts and sheets to take them up and air them out. She stood on her bed and unlatched the wooden skylight, which must have been overlooked, and using the steps hewn into the wall, climbed out onto the roof and pulled the blankets out after her. Her laundry line must have been deemed insignificant, it still hung between two wooden beams as it had long before she had moved in.  
  
She reached down to throw her now filthy tobacco stripe quit and the zig- zag quilt she had helped Diego's mother with when she had been in bed with bronchitis; Rosa had given it to her finished for her birthday several months later.  
  
She tossed them over the line and was about to drop back into her room to find the old tennis racket she used to beat them with, when something caught her eye.  
  
Smoke, not the horrible billowing smoke she had seen when the place had been burned, but a regular plume, like had used to issue forth from several of the rooftops as long as she could remember, sacrificial fires that many of the Native American scholars kept burning for spells and rites she was never privy to.  
  
There was one principle flame that always burned at Espiritu, a sort of honor to the Four who guarded their home, and sign that the residents there were ever vigilant. Lucy had not expected it to be still burning, but if she was placing the location of it correctly the fire was coming from the rooftop in the far corner of the complex, the oldest section of the place. That was where the flame had always been kept before.  
  
But the smoke wasn't regular, it was being interrupted, someone was trying to build it up, or snuff it out, but what was important was that someone had violated the protections in some manner. The protection the Maintainers had left over the school would only let a member of the school within a certain range. She didn't know how this person had managed to get through to desecrate her home, but she was going to find out right now.  
  
She scurried back down to her room, tossing off her robes and pulling on a pair of jeans with holes in the knees and an old white Spanish style camisole. If this person happened to be a non-mage, she didn't want to appear to be anything other than a normal person, a normal person who happened to live here. She didn't want to take the time to find her sandals, so she burst out her door and made her way across the complex in her bare feet, thanking the little gods that the thick soles of her feet hadn't been softened too much by nine months of wearing shoes and socks.  
  
As she got nearer to the site, she was convinced that this wasn't a true desecrator, but perhaps a homeless vagabond. She could detect no signs of magic, and what's more, she could hear the sound of a radio tuned to the local classic rock station. Not really the sounds of a dangerous foe.  
  
She found herself sneaking up, hovering to make herself more silent, although the radio was covering her approach pretty well, until she was just a ladder climb away from the level where the fire and activity was coming from, the patio outside Dona Luca's set of apartments, she had been the keeper of this flame for twenty years, and had never conceded to moving to a less remote spot; she liked having the fire outside of her door.  
  
She slowly creeped up the ladder, she heard sounds coming from inside the apartment, and she crawled over and tried to pear in the window. The glass was dirty, but she thought she made out the form of someone tall moving out of the kitchen and back toward the bedroom.  
  
Well, she wasn't going to let him rob them blind, she thought. Deciding the robber wasn't going towards the front, she went back toward the flat area outside the door, walked past the door and around the other side, heading for a ladder on the backside so she could drop down through the skylight.  
  
That was when she heard something clatter to the ground behind her.  
  
She whipped around to see the form of a young man of obvious Mexican heritage having just emerged from the front door, a wooden bowl and its powdery contents spilled at his feet. He must have been a local, because it was 102 degrees out and he was wearing dark denim jeans and a black T- shirt. A black T-shirt that read "The boat sank. Get over it."…. just like the shirt she had bought for……  
  
Lucy's eyes grew wide and for the first time she forced herself to look at the face of the stranger.  
  
The eyes of her best friend in the world stared back at her, as if he were seeing a ghost.  
  
Diego went as pale as she had ever seen him, his mouth hung open and he had this tortured, haunted look in his eye as he stared at her reaching out his hand a bit as if he wanted to try and touch her.  
  
Lucy remained frozen. She was hallucinating. Diego was gone, gone with the rest of them, and now because some man had stolen his shirt she was fooling herself into believing her was alive. Tears started to pour down her cheeks as she shook her head and backed away. "No, you're not real…" she muttered.  
  
"What!" Diego had snapped out of his trance at the sound of her voice, and before she knew what had happened he made a sound that sounded half like a shout and half like a sob and had crossed the distance between them in a stride, reaching her and picking her up, crushing her against him. At that moment Lucy couldn't distinguish which sobs were hers and which were Deigo's.  
  
"I…I thought you were a ghost…" he murmered into her hair. Lucy just buried her face in his shoulder.  
  
"I thought I was hallucinating."  
  
They pulled apart and stared at each other's tear streaked faces.  
  
"I thought you were dead." They both said at once.  
  
"What?" Again, in unison.  
  
"The Circle told me there were no survivors."  
  
"I got sent to the Sahara for a two week seminar about 20 hours before it happened. They told me when I woke up that anyone from the school that wasn't under the protections of a school would have been killed by the backlash energy. And then, when your name wasn't on the list of Masters to be placed with Circle schools next year, and the beads, I couldn't feel you anymore…"  
  
He looked at her seriously for a moment.  
  
"Are you really ok?"  
  
She nodded. "I got the backlash full force, and so did Faustas so he couldn't protect me like before, stopped breathing. One of the professors broke my connection while it was exposed and I was all right after that."  
  
"The beads?"  
  
"They had to cut them off me, they were burning…., anyway, that must have severed the link."  
  
"And the lists."  
  
"I'll be at Hogwarts next year."  
  
"Who are you and what have you done with Lucy Montero?"  
  
Lucy laughed and threw her arms around him again, happier than words could describe to hear that chuckle deep in his throat again. Diego let out a whoop and whirled her around, then suddenly stopped.  
  
"Why didn't anyone ever tell us?"  
  
Lucy thought for a moment, "Are you supposed to be here right now?"  
  
Diego shook his head. "I'm supposed to be in the Sahara. But they let me come back for the Fourth of July."  
  
Lucy grinned, "That's right, it is the fourth isn't it…. well, maybe they knew that if WE knew we would never consent to living apart, and that we were more of a target together?"  
  
Diego shrugged, "From the look of this place those bastards got whatever they came for."  
  
"Actually, they were looking for one other thing…."  
  
"Oh?"  
  
"I'll explain later. What say you to finding out if there are any bottle rockets left in the east cellar?"  
  
Diego grinned and looked down at her devilishly, "Later, right now I think we should play a game."  
  
Lucy raised her eyebrows, "A game? What game might that be?"  
  
Diego waggled his eyebrows.  
  
"Oh no, no, Diego, no! Don't even think about it."  
  
"Yes yes yes."  
  
"No, never again, no!"  
  
"I think it's time for a game of Toss the Lucy."  
  
"No, I said no!"  
  
"You better run chica!"  
  
"Diego no!"  
  
"Ten, nine, eight, four, three, two, one!"  
  
"Ahhh!"  
  
She had no choice but to run for her life as Diego took off in hot pursuit.  
  
From the shrieks and giggles emanating from the rooftops of the buildings, one would never have guessed that the two no-longer-quite-children who made them had recently lost their entire family, or were alone in the world, or that they faced the insurmountable task of cleaning up the tragedies of the past.  
  
It was just another happy Fourth of July, the carefree attitude of the pair reflected in the slightly static filled song coming from Diego's old radio. It was, ironically enough, a song written by Englishmen, being covered by a popular American muggle band known, ironically enough again, as the Grateful Dead.  
  
'Picture yourself in a boat on a river, with tangerine trees and marmalade skies.  
  
Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly, a girl with kaleidescope eyes.  
  
Cellophane flowers of yellow and green, towering over your head.  
  
Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes and she's gone…..  
  
Lucy in the sky with diamonds…..  
  
Lucy in the sky with diamonds….  
  
Lucy in the sky with diamonds……' 


End file.
